At times we might end up on a server setup where there is no MySQL, or on a hosting where MySQL is expensive, or say you would like to play around with Wordpress plugins or themes on your local machine, but there's no point in installing MySQL for that. I have had a personal experience where a pay-as-you-go host nearlyfreespeech.net charges you for MySQL but they provide SQLite bindings for all popular languages which includes PHP, so I thought of installing Wordpress with database as SQLite, so I did some research and installed it, and I thought of sharing it people who might have such a requirement.

You can use SQLite on production environment too, generally on websites with daily visits less than 100k, the best part about SQLite is it's portability, in case you would like to switch servers, just copy all the files in the Wordpress directory and you'll be up and running within mintues. You can use this to run your blog off your laptop on you school intranet with very little overhead on your laptop.

How

Running Wordpress on SQLite is made possible by PDO plugin for Wordpress, so you'll need a PHP installation >= 5.1 with PDO sqlite module enabled, you may check this by running phpinfo().

Download PDO for Wordpress, extract and copy the content of pdo-for-wordpress directory into /wordpress/wp-content/ directory.

Open /wordpress/wp-config.php in a text editor add the following:

PHP:

define('DB_TYPE', 'sqlite'); // use sqlite

immediately after:

PHP:

define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Create the following directory /wordpress/wp-content/database/ and change permissions so that the user running web server (e.g. apache in case of Apache web server) to be able to write to it, this is where the SQLite database will be stored.

That's it, fire up your web browser and navigate to http://<your-domain>/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php to complete the installation.

Easier Way

For all those people who don't want to get into the hassle, a friendly guy has created a repack version of Wordpress with PDO plugin pre-installed and ready to rock, please go here for details.